Thanks for the terrific tip. It sounds so simple and obvious, but it seems to help me. I find I have hard time with Pimsleur because my concentration breaks down. So now after listining to a lesson I try to use what you showed and that helps me retain more.

I’m a Spanish teacher and I use a lot of Spanish pop songs to teach my students, and it seems to work pretty well. There isn’t a lot of pressure and listening to music is fun. Students will often tell me words or how to say something and when I ask them how they know it, they’ll say, “Don’t you remember, it was in that song you taught us”. A very current popular artist right now, who has relatively easy songs to learn is Juanes (from Colombia).

Anyways, I really like http://chinesepod.com for learning chinese, and I got a bunch of kids videos in English and chinese, like Dora the Explorer. They are made for Chinese kids to learn English, but they are great the other way around too… just have them on in the background or watch them with your kids!

Thanks for the terrific links. I’m a huge fan of podcasts. Especially when they are as useful as these.

Best,
Michael

When I was living in Berlin and trying to add the final touches to German fluency, I was amazed at how much seemed to result from simply flipping on the radio to native-speaker German first thing in the morning, before my brain could start thinking in English. Turn on the TV, and there’s more rapid-fire German. Flip on the radio before bed, end things with colloquial German. Basically, immersing oneself in native speakers is the only way to develop an ear for it and to ingrain one’s own verbal sensibility.

We may be living in an all-but-exclusively English (and Spanish) language culture, but the Great Overlords of The Internet have given us a great boon here: THE PODCAST. Now it IS possible to wake up and go to bed with a foreign language in one’s ears. At my French teacher’s recommendation, I started downloading the simplified daily news ("Journal en français facile") from Radio France International. RFI also posts a transcript to aid comprehension; my current regimen is to listen to the 0930 cast with the transcript when I download it, then listen to it again on the iPod a couple times on my commute to and from work the next day. (I’ve also gotten hooked on one of RFI’s bilingual radio plays.) After a couple days, I’ve gone from being astounded that they consider this machine-gun patter "facile", to understanding nuances that I hadn’t picked up in US news sources. Not to mention that a quick listen before French class is an excellent way to get one’s head in the game and vice versa.

BBC Languages also has a good French site with audio news stories, quizzes, comprehension exercises, etc.

I’m not sure about other languages, but my favorite German radio station is Radio Multikulti. It’s not set up explicitly for German learners, but it features German news, comedy, etc geared to both Germans and non-native-speaker German residents. Other cool features: segments in a different language (from Serbo-Croatian to Vietnamese) every hour for much of the day, and groovy world music all night.